


Blossom

by LeaperSonata



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adoption, Babies, Children, F/F, Fluff, Found Family, Kidfic, Minor NPC death in the beginning, Pining, parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 23:42:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4806647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeaperSonata/pseuds/LeaperSonata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scout Harding is definitely not in love with Dagna, and she definitely wants nothing to do with this baby.</p><p>Ridiculous tropetastic fluff that will rot your teeth out. Purely self-indulgent. Cute dwarves with a cute baby dwarf.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Unexpected Discovery

The sounds of fighting became obvious from ahead. Scout Harding swore, then clapped a hand over her mouth guiltily. “Sorry. This area was supposed to be safe and cleared out!” She turned to Dagna as she pulled out and strung her bow. “Arcanist, stay behind me.”

Dagna beamed and produced a dagger that flickered with electricity in a variety of colors. “Maybe I can test this!”

Harding groaned. “Please stay behind me? I’m glad you have something to defend yourself with if you need to, but I’d really rather you didn’t! You’re irreplaceable!”

“You say the sweetest things, Scout.” Dagna grinned. “I’ll try and stay back.”

Harding turned back to face the fighting hurriedly, to hide her blush. She hadn’t meant — but protesting would only make it worse. And Dagna was — something. Like lightning herself, but terrifyingly _friendly_ lightning. In a very pretty package. There really was no one like her, even leaving aside her skills.

Now was not the time for this train of thought. Harding nocked an arrow and held it at the ready as she advanced through the trees, focusing on the sounds of fighting ahead and putting other concerns aside.

Looking to either side, she spotted a large rock outcropping that led up to a cliff overlooking where it sounded like the fighting was. She caught Dagna’s wrist and gestured towards the hill, ignoring the small flip in her stomach at the contact. Dagna looked confused, but nodded and headed towards the hill.

Harding hurried ahead of her to make sure she reached the edge of the cliff in time. She had read the land correctly — the fighting was almost at her feet.

It looked like a caravan of surface dwarves had been set upon by a great bear — and judging by their clothing and their clear inexperience in the fight, they were probably merchant caste who had only recently come to the surface and had no idea what they were doing.

“Great,” Harding muttered under her breath, and opened a bottle of tears of the dead from her belt and dunked her arrowhead into it, then drew it again and shot the bear near its tail. She was pleased to see the tactic succeeded in making the bear spin around to look at the new assailant, giving the other dwarves below an opening to attack.

She blocked out the dwarves already lying motionless on the ground and forced down the urge to flinch when the bear turned back and tore open a woman armed only with a frying pan and cleaver. Her next arrow came up from the bottle dry. Damn.

There was a tap on her shoulder and she spun to see Dagna holding out an arrow with a head that glowed a disconcerting white-blue. Harding stopped herself from considering whether Dagna had just been carrying that the whole time or if she’d just fished it out of Harding’s quiver and enchanted it during the battle. She nodded shortly and reached out to take it.

“Careful,” Dagna said, pulling it back for a moment. “Don’t touch the head.”

“All right. Thank you.” Harding took hold of the arrow well back on the shaft, sent a silent prayer to Andraste that she could still shoot it properly if she didn’t draw it back all the way and also that it wouldn’t set her bow on fire, aimed for the bear’s eye, and loosed.

The arrow sank into the bear’s skull and it reared up in pain — and then its head exploded. It crumpled to the ground in a heap. Harding nocked another arrow and looked around for any other threats, then slowly let out a breath. She looked down at the caravan and swallowed. No one was moving.

Harding slung her bow over her back, leaving it strung just in case, and looked for the closest safe way down off of the cliff. Clambering down quickly, she ran for the caravan and started checking the fallen bodies for breath, to see if there was anyone left alive.

When she reached the woman with the frying pan and leaned down over her, her eyes snapped open and she seized Harding’s wrist. “My... baby. Take care... of her.” She looked at Dagna. “You two... be for her... what I... cannot.” Everything she had left had gone into forcing out those words, and as she finished speaking, she went limp.

Harding freed her hand and gently closed the dead woman’s eyes, blinking back tears. “None of them. We couldn’t save any of them.”

Dagna was uncharacteristically solemn, looking down at the bodies.

Their reverie was interrupted by a thin wail. Dagna jerked into motion and headed for the wagon the sound was coming from. “The baby!”

Harding blanched. She couldn’t possibly really take care of someone’s baby. She was... she had a job! She was busy! There were lots of other people out there who had time for babies!

Dagna reappeared from around the side of the wagon, holding a small bundle that trailed blankets on the ground. Harding sighed and went over to her to grab the blanket and wrap it around the baby properly.

As she tucked the blanket over the bundle, Harding looked down at it and was caught by the baby’s eyes. They were a sparkling hazel not unlike her own, and she froze. The infant stretched out a hand and grabbed a lock of her hair that had come loose, babbling happily.

Dagna wiggled her fingers in the baby’s face until they distracted her enough to let go of Harding and grab Dagna instead. She immediately shoved a finger into her mouth and began contentedly gumming. Dagna sighed. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

Harding looked up at the other girl in surprise. She wouldn’t have expected Dagna to get soppy about anything that didn’t have lyrium in it. Dagna was smiling down at the baby, a gentler light in her eyes than usual — the wildfire tamed and in a fireplace, perhaps. Harding shook her head to clear that image.

Dagna looked up at her in confusion. “You don’t think she’s pretty?”

“No! I mean, yes, of course she’s pretty. I wasn’t shaking my head at that. I mean. She’s a baby. Don’t babies all sort of look like babies?”

Dagna grinned. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you unsure what to do before, Scout Harding. Come on. Babies have to eat, right? Either we have to find a goat, or we have to get back to camp and make someone else find a goat. I could probably figure out how to make one of us lactate, but it would take a while, and babies probably can’t wait for experiments, can they? I have to eat between doing things, so it stands to reason a baby has to too.” She shifted the bundle to wrap both arms around the baby and grinned down at her. “She’s so _small_. I knew people started out small, but I haven’t seen a baby this little before!” She paused, struck, and looked up at Harding. “I don’t know what her name is!”

“Maybe it’s written on something?” Harding hazarded. “I’ll look!” She walked a little too quickly over to the wagon and started looking through things, making a small pile to one side of things that looked like they belonged to the baby or her mother. She should have _something_ of her past. Harding definitely wasn’t trying to get away from the terrifyingly fragile little scrap of life.

When she shifted a dresser that had fallen over, she found a cradle that must belong to the baby, since there weren’t any others in the group. Presumably. She had a brief flash of panic at the idea that there were a dozen more babies lurking in the wagons, waiting to grab her and _look_ at her like that.

In the cradle was an embroidered blanket and a carved doll. There were runes carved across the head of the cradle, but she couldn’t read them. Dumping the other things she had found, including the pile of diapers and baby tunics that a drawer of the dresser jarred open when she moved it had revealed, into the cradle, she wrestled it out to the side of the wagon. “Arcanist?” she called. “Would you come look at—” She turned to find Dagna standing a few feet behind her, watching with interest. She blushed. “I, um. This cradle has writing on it that I thought might be her name? But I can’t read it, and you’re from Orzammar, aren’t you, so I thought maybe you could?”

Dagna nodded enthusiastically and bounced forward to peer at the cradle. “It says her name is... Cvetka. Setka in Common, probably. I don’t think most people up here will manage ‘cvet’.”

“‘Suh-vet-kuh’,” Harding muttered to herself.

Dagna grinned at her. “Stick with Setka for now, Surfacer.”

Harding’s stomach dropped. She had expected Dagna to be like other Orzammar dwarves, but— No. She ignored it. “I don’t want to call the baby the wrong name!”

Dagna freed a hand from the bundle of baby and caught and squeezed one of Harding’s, letting go again and returning her arm to supporting the baby before Harding even realized what was happening. “She won’t know for ages! I’ll help you practice, so by the time she does, you can say it. But later. First we have to get this baby out of the open.” She looked between the cradle and its pile of baby supplies, and the baby in her arms. “Do you want to carry Cvetka, or the cradle?”

“Cradle!” Harding said hurriedly, scooping it up before Dagna had a chance to protest. It was heavy and unwieldy, but it would suffer a lot less if she had to drop it and draw her bow if something else happened that needed shooting. That was definitely the only reason she didn’t want to carry the baby. “Let’s get back to the camp.” She walked ahead of Dagna, blinking rapidly.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cvetka means blossom in Slovene. I did a lot of poking around behindthename looking for names that seemed like they fit Thedas dwarves. Branka was the first name I tried that registered as a 'real' name, so I went poking around all the origins/usages listed for it and the other names in those usages. And Cvetka/Setka is what I landed on. I think it works.


	2. Goats? Goats!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harding finds something to milk to feed the baby.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The long-awaited! Maybe? Anyway I finally finished another chapter of this. Working on the next. Hopefully it will take me less than four months. (Sorry. Fall/winter is hard.)
> 
> Goats totally canonically exist in Thedas. No, seriously. Codex Entry: A Letter To Harding (in Jaws of Hakkon, according to the wiki) mentions turnip-goat stew, which therefore means that goats exist. (And turnips, but I knew about turnips, because the Orlesians insult Hawke by calling her a turnip-head in Mark Of The Assassin.) Anyway! I'm not actually making things up for narrative convenience like I thought I was! CANON GOATS. I am unduly pleased by this.

Harding felt more in her element once they got back to camp and she could put the cradle down next to Dagna’s tent. It was a small expedition, since the area was supposed to be safe, but she did have a half-dozen other scouts under her command in case something happened and to help hunt for food, so that Harding could go along with Dagna to keep track of her and not worry about where their next meal was coming from.

Now she just had to worry about finding a goat. She went to the supply tent and took out some rope. “Right. Um. Arcanist. I’m going to go... find a goat or a sheep or a druffalo or something. You stay here with the baby, and—” she looked around for the scout that should be working in the camp right now, locating the elven woman fletching arrows next to the fire “—Nerissa, and you’ll be fine, and I’ll find a goat.”

Shutting her mouth before she babbled any further or Dagna had a chance to respond, Harding spun and headed out of the camp, towards the nearby valley. If she couldn’t find anything there, she’d head up the mountains on the other side and look for goats.

 

*

 

Harding glared at the goat. The goat glared back, chewing on a large mouthful of what looked like embrium. “It _would_ be a goat. Not a nice, docile sheep. It had to be a goat. Why wouldn’t my day have a goat in it, on top of everything else?”

She grabbed a handful of grass from next to her, tore it out of the ground, and started furiously braiding it without looking away from the goat. It was easier to think when her hands were doing something.

“Contessa could catch you for me,” she informed the goat. “It wouldn’t take her more than a minute.” Unfortunately, the Harding family farm’s mabari was back in the Hinterlands, along with the Harding family farm and the rest of the Harding family who hadn’t decided to go risk their necks scouting for the Inquisition. “I bet other scouts don’t have to catch goats. They get nice, easy assignments, where you shoot things, and there aren’t any stupid foolhardy Arcanists with daggers they want to test to have to protect. And they don’t find babies.” The goat blinked at her, interrupting its horizontal yellow glare for a moment.

She sighed. Standing here and glaring at the goat didn’t get her any closer to catching it. Dropping the braid of grass, she pulled a coil of rope off of her belt and fashioned a lasso. Sending a silent prayer to Andraste, she tossed the lasso at the goat’s head.

The goat ducked the lasso, trotting forward to grab her grass braid. Harding lunged at it, but it nimbly dodged and trotted away, trailing the braid behind it, leaving Harding to fall face-first to the ground.

Harding swore into the dirt and pushed herself up into a sitting position. She wiped her face, then glared at the dirt her hand came away with that mixed into blood from a scrape on her palm. “I hate goats.” If she didn’t wash this out now, it might go bad and interfere with using her bow. Luckily, there was a stream in the direction the goat had gone. Muttering imprecations on the goat’s breeding, she made her way for it.

The goat’s tracks veered off to the right, upstream, so she headed downstream from it to clean off her hand. After applying some elfroot salve and a basic bandage and testing that she still had enough flexibility in the hand to use her bow, she went back out into the meadow to find the goat’s tracks again, then followed them upstream.

When she found the goat again, it was standing ankle-deep in the stream, placidly munching spindleweed and not looking at all like a demon in disguise. “I am reasonably sure that goats are not meant to eat all those herbs,” Harding informed it. The goat blinked at her with slot-eyed implacability and swallowed. “At this rate, your milk is going to end up being a potion that turns the baby purple or something.” She sighed. “The Arcanist would probably find that delightful and start breeding goats.”

Harding examined the streambed. There wasn’t much in the way of anywhere that she could corner the goat. There was a cliff behind it, but the stream continued in both directions, and she couldn’t block either side _and_ chase the goat up against the cliff so she could get close enough to grab it. “If Contessa was here, we’d manage,” she grumbled again. Maybe she should get a mabari for herself. Then again, they weren’t terribly subtle animals, and a scout needed to be able to be subtle. And a scout did not usually chase goats.

“I gave up livestock, you know,” she said. “I left the farm, and nobody would ever make me milk a sheep again, and I could just do the fun parts. I like scouting. I’m good at scouting. I make _lots_ of money. If we were anywhere near civilization, I could _buy_ a goat. A _better_ goat. I am not supposed to have to worry about catching a goat. That was not in the plan.”

Harding sighed and looked around for anything she might be able to use for... something. A herding mabari and a goat pen did not appear. “You should be glad the Arcanist isn’t here,” she told the goat. “She’d probably set you on fire trying to use something complicated and experimental to catch you.”

 

*

 

Harding trudged back into camp. Her hair was wildly in disarray, and full of bits of leaf and twig. There was a smear of mud on her cheek, and her pants were soaked to the waist on one side. In one hand was a generous bunch of elfroot and spindleweed. In the other was a rope that lead to a goat determinedly following the herbs, managing to snatch a periodic mouthful.

“Would you like a hand with that?” Nerissa asked as Harding passed her.

Harding could see the smile the other scout was fighting back. “No, thank you,” she said shortly. She managed to coax the goat over to the horses, where she tied its lead rope to a stake and dropped the bundle of herbs on the ground. The goat immediately took an enormous bite of spindleweed and settled in to chew.

Keeping a suspicious eye on it, Harding turned towards the tents. “Arcanist?”

Dagna stuck her head out of the tent. There appeared to be thread caught in her _eyebrow_ , and several chunks of her hair had been pulled loose. Harding suddenly questioned the wisdom of leaving the Arcanist alone with the baby. Hopefully she hadn’t tried to put runes on it. “Scout Harding, you’re ba— Goodness, you look terrible. What happened?”

“A goat happened. This one. It’s in milk. We can feed the baby.”

Dagna’s face brightened. “Oh, good!” She stepped the rest of the way out of the tent, revealing Setka cradled in her arms, her dress in disarray.

Harding was almost afraid to ask, but her mouth opened before she could stop it. “What were you doing?”

“I’m _sure_ there’s a more efficient way to tie on a diaper, if I can just figure out the knot. And then I got distracted trying to work out if something could be done about the smell...”

Harding put one hand to her forehead, immediately regretting it when she jarred her scraped palm. “Please don’t enchant the baby, Arcanist. Or her clothes.”

Dagna looked guilty. “It wouldn’t be very much—”

“ _No_ , Dagna. Too many of your perfectly safe creations explode. You are not exploding the baby.” Harding sighed. “It’s bad enough that this goat seems determined to eat an entire apothecary worth of herbs. Maker knows what its milk will do. You can study that, if you need to study something. Tell me if it turns the baby purple.” She shook her head again, at nothing in particular, and trudged off towards the supply carts to get a change of clothes.

“Scout, wait! Where are you going?”

“To put on clothes that don’t have half a stream in them. I’ll be back shortly.” Dagna hadn’t exploded the baby while she was gone, so Dagna could wait ten more minutes while Harding got dry.

 

 

 


	3. Feeding time

Harding finished pinning her hair back into place and took a last look in the wavery silver of the mirror. It was an expensive vanity, but she could more than afford luxuries these days. Plain silver mirrors weren’t as clear as glass, but it stood up better to the hazards of her lifestyle. A glass one probably would have broken within a week. She had to have the silver one re-polished periodically, but it worked fine.

She stepped out of the tent and headed towards the hobbles. When she turned the last corner, she saw Dagna standing several feet from them, holding Setka and looking at the goat uncertainly.

“I expected something to have happened while I was gone,” Harding commented.

Dagna jumped. “Scout! I, um. I wasn’t sure what you _do_ with a goat. And I was afraid it would bite Cvetka. Did it bite you?” She gestured at the bandage on Harding’s hand.

“What? Oh, no. I just fell and scraped it trying to catch the goat.” Harding grimaced down at her hand. “I should probably change the bandage after the stream got into it. But we need to do something about the goat first, because the baby will probably be hungry soon, if she isn’t already.”

“How do we get the milk from the goat to Cvetka?”

“That’s... a good question. Usually there are bottles, leather contraptions. I don’t have any, we aren’t near a town where we could buy some, and there weren’t any in the wagon — presumably the baby’s mother made her own milk and didn’t need one.” Harding sighed. “I don’t trust goats. It’s probably not safe to just try and stick the baby on her udder and hope. She might kick, and babies are fragile. I think we’ve got some extra nugskin gloves in the supplies I can let her suckle on, and I can milk the goat into a waterskin. I’ll go look for things.”

“Can I help?” Dagna asked, looking slightly desperate — possibly just to get away from the goat.

“I think your hands are full of baby,” Harding pointed out, but when Dagna drooped, she added, “But you can keep me company, if you like.”

Dagna perked up again and trotted along after Harding, quickly catching up to walk at her side as they headed for the extra tent where the supplies were stored. “I was looking through the things we took in the cradle with Cvetka, and I think her family were Smith caste before they left for the surface. Like me.”

Harding threw a suspicious glance at Dagna. “Arcanist, you are absolutely forbidden from trying to teach the baby how to forge until she can at least _walk_.” Dagna looked impossibly innocent, which probably meant that she had absolutely been intending to try to teach an infant to forge.

They reached the supply tent, and Harding untied the flap again and started looking for the gloves and waterskins. Dagna continued talking behind her. “How did you know exactly what to come look for? I had no idea how we’d get the milk into the baby if it wasn’t straight from the teat, though I could probably have worked something out, I was thinking about valves and keeping it warm, but you went straight to gloves.”

“Like I said, I grew up on a farm. Sometimes animals won’t suckle their babes, and you have to feed the kid or lamb yourself. And sometimes you can’t find a bottle — or the last baby chewed through it and you haven’t fixed it yet — and have to improvise. Soaking a cloth in milk and letting them suck on it will work too, in a pinch.” Harding opened a bundle as she spoke, revealing a pile of gloves of various sizes and materials, and rifled through them until she produced a soft nugskin pair. She tied the bundle neatly back together and stepped further into the tent towards where the spare waterskins were kept.

“Animals won’t nurse their own children? Why? I thought animals were all natural parents, the way people talk about them. Do animals in the wild do it too? Do those babies die?”

“I don’t know about all wild animals. There’s no one out watching their births to see. But some farm animals just don’t want to be mothers, and if you don’t take the babe away after they reject it, they might hurt it.” Harding rummaged through the waterskins, comparing, before selecting the one with the widest mouth, on the theory that it would be easier to milk into.

Having retrieved the waterskin and gloves, Harding stepped back out of the supply tent and headed back towards the hobbles, Dagna trotting after her with Setka. When they reached the goat, Harding sighed and mentally girded her loins for battle. Dagna perched on a log nearby, balancing Setka on her knees, and settled in to watch like it was an event, maybe one of those Provings Harding had heard about.

Harding grabbed a stem of elfroot from a nearby plant and an armful of hay from the horses’ feed and dumped it all in front of the goat, hoping the elfroot would keep her interested enough to work through the rest and stay distracted from what Harding was doing. She squatted down next to it with the waterskin and reached under the goat. Experimentally, she grabbed one of its teats and pulled, waiting to see how the goat would react.

The goat, now that it had been captured, seemed content to defy all expectations of inconvenience on its part and munched away unconcernedly on the hay, unmoving, as a small jet of milk squirted out onto the grass below. Reassured, Harding positioned the waterskin beneath the teat and started to milk into it one-handedly.

When she reached the fourth teat, the goat had finished all of the elfroot out of the hay without her noticing, and rewarded her with a kick at her side. Luckily, long instinct twisted her out of the way, and it only struck the thick muscle of her thigh.

“Scout! Are you all right?” Dagna cried in alarm. Startled by the noise, Setka, who had been dozing against the Arcanist’s chest, woke up and started to cry.

Harding winced. “I’m fine. I’ll bruise, but no real damage. It seems the goat is done with this for now, but I got plenty for the baby. Sounds like she’s more than ready for it.” She stood and walked over to Dagna’s log carrying the skin of milk with only a slight limp. That was definitely going to be a marvelous bruise later.

She sat down next to the other woman, capping the skin, and set it on her lap so she could pull out one of the gloves from her belt. “Hopefully I remember how to do this so it doesn’t drench the baby.”

Dagna beamed at her with disconcerting faith, ineffectually rocking Setka, who continued to cry.. “I’m sure you will!”

Harding tied together the ring and smallest fingers of the glove, and the pointer finger and thumb, as tightly as she could, so that the palm of the glove would funnel everything down into the middle finger. Uncapping the waterskin again, she poured in enough milk that the middle finger swelled, stopping when it reached the top. She capped the skin again and pulled out a knife. “Fingers crossed this works,” she said as lightly as she could, and bent up the end of the finger and carefully cut open a single stitch in the fingertip. Absently, she stuck the knife into the log next to her, then unbent the glove finger and squeezed it gently. She was rewarded with a dribble of milk. “Hopefully this is slow enough it won’t choke her. Usually it’s more than one stitch, but animals probably drink faster.”

She reached out towards Setka with the glove, and Dagna immediately held her out closer so it would be easier for harding to reach. Setka eyed the glove with confusion, continuing to wail, but when Harding set it on her lips and squeezed so a little milk dribbled out, she eagerly opened her mouth and started sucking on it, her wails ceasing.

Harding breathed a sigh of relief and looked up to smile in triumph at Dagna. When her eyes met Dagna’s, the Arcanist’s were shining so brightly that Harding lost her breath, then choked on her next inhale and had to turn away to cough, blushing furiously. She was a grown woman, she definitely shouldn’t feel like her chest had just been filled with electric runes when she looked at someone.

Hoping the red remaining in her cheeks could be assumed to be from the coughing, she turned back in time for Setka to finish the small amount of milk in the glove and start wailing with redoubled fury.

“I should have poured more in,” Harding muttered, fighting the urge to run away and splash water on her face. She fumbled the waterskin open again and hurriedly poured more milk into the glove, accidentally slopping some over the side and onto Dagna’s sleeve. “I’m sorry, Arc—” she started to say, but Dagna cut her off.

“It’s all right, Scout. All my clothes are very washable! They have to be, or I’d have to wear all black, because I get covered in soot so often. And I’d probably manage to bleach black, or set it on fire or something.”

Without thinking, Harding looked back up at Dagna as she spoke, and was confronted by the Arcanist’s smile again. Her stomach flipped and she decided she was utterly beyond hope. She felt like a character in one of the Seeker’s terrible romance novels.

The moment was broken by the furious Setka managing to sock Dagna in the chin with one flailing fist. Harding was even more mortified and contrite, and hurriedly moved the glove back to Setka’s mouth, babbling apologies.

Dagna, to Harding’s chagrin, only giggled. “She’s strong for a baby! I guess those hammer muscles develop early, don’t they, Cvetka?” she cooed at the baby, who had immediately quieted and turned her focus to sucking on the glove as hard as she could.

Harding used keeping an eye on the level of milk in the glove as an excuse to look down and not at Dagna, though she was agonizingly aware of the short distance between their sides, and the fact that one of her arms was brushing against Dagna’s. (Other nearby regions of Dagna’s torso were _definitely_ not to be thought of.)

Harding coughed. “Um. She should probably sleep in my tent, I guess, since I know how to feed her?”

Dagna shook her head hard enough that Harding could feel the motion even looking away. “You need your sleep, so you can do scouting things! I can learn how to feed her.” When Harding hesitated, Dagna sighed. “I know I get excited, but I promise I won’t enchant Cvetka while you’re asleep.”

Harding looked up, startled. “I didn’t think you would! Just that it would be easier for me to do it, so—”

“We’re both in charge of her, right? And you have more responsibilities!”

“You need to be awake too, this whole expedition is for you!”

Dagna sighed. “Maybe we could trade off?”

“It would be ridiculous to carry the baby between tents in the middle of the night,” Harding said, swallowing hard.

“It would. I guess we’ll have to share a tent. That is, if you wouldn’t mind it, Scout?”

Harding felt slightly faint, but she tried to keep her tone even. “Who would? I mean, for the baby. I mean, no. I mean I wouldn’t mind. Arcanist.”

Dagna giggled, and Harding blushed harder. She was usually decent at talking, and now a pretty girl was making her trip over her tongue like a day-old lamb. It was embarrassing for a woman her age to be so affected.

“My tent is bigger, I think,” Dagna continued blithely, “And Cvetka’s things are already in it, so I guess you should move yours into it too?”

Harding managed a nod and stood jerkily, knocking the (luckily capped) skin of milk to the ground. “I’ll go, um, pack,” she said, and fled.

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh god this has taken me a million years to post, I'm so sorry.

Harding made it to the shelter of her tent and hurled herself inside, feeling like an utter fool. She was supposed to run away from danger, not pretty girls holding babies. Oh, Maker, she’d just run off and left Dagna with Setka. Again. A fine caretaker she was turning out to be.

She stomped irritably over to her small folding table and dumped water out of the waterskin into the hammered copper bowl to splash her burning face with. She looked around her tent. Dagna was right, her tent was smaller - exactly big enough to hold her and her things. She had spent some of her early wages on the best tent she could commission, and she’d been gradually outfitting it to perfect comfort for someone her size. These days, it felt more like home than anything else did. She certainly spent the most time in it.

Dagna’s tent was more generically nice, because it was an Inquisition tent rather than a personal one - though Harding, thinking bitter thoughts about chairs you practically needed pitons to scale, had made sure that all of its furnishings were of the appropriate size for a dwarf.

There wasn’t much point in leaving her tent over here half-empty, so Harding neatly packed up everything in the tent and then took down the tent itself.

Looking at the pile of bundles on the ground, she knew it would be wiser to go get one of the pack mules to carry it all across camp... But Dagna was probably still over by the animals, and Harding wasn’t ready to face her yet after running like that.

As if on cue, a bright voice sounded behind her. “Scout! Cvetka fell asleep, and Nerissa said she was off duty and would keep an eye on her. So I thought I’d come and help you pack - but I see you’re already done! Goodness, you’re fast. I guess you probably get a lot of practice. I can help you carry your things over, then! You took down your tent, too?” Dagna finally paused for an answer.

“Um,” Harding managed. “I was going to go get one of the mules to haul everything over so I wouldn’t have to make so many trips, but with two of us we can probably manage without.”

Dagna grinned and flexed her arm theatrically, making an impressive bicep stand out against her sleeve. Harding’s mouth went dry. “I’m at least as strong as a mule,” Dagna said cheerfully. “I’m sure you’re plenty strong too, pulling that bow all day. So I’m sure between the two of us brawny dwarven maidens, we can manage it.” Dagna giggled, then hefted the largest of the bundles easily onto one hip and set off blithely towards her tent.

Harding herded her thoughts back into order, determinedly not thinking about the assets of brawny dwarven maidens, grabbed another bundle, and hurried after Dagna, trying not to stare at her arms.

When they finished carting the bundles across camp, there was in a neat pile in front of Dagna’s tent. “I saw you packed up your tent too. Were you going to set it back up over here?”

“I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like all my things and all your things and all the baby’s things might not fit in yours, and anyway there was no point in leaving mine still set up empty.”

Dagna frowned at the space next to her tent. “I think there’s room to just set it back up here. Would that work?”

Harding nodded, relieved. “We can move the cradle in with whoever’s up, and switch in shifts?”

Dagna nodded. “That sounds like a good idea. It wouldn’t’ve worked without moving your tent over, because we can’t drag Cvetka’s cradle all over camp, but this’ll work.” Dagna stepped purposefully towards the bundles, then paused. “I don’t think I know how to set up a tent.”

Harding smiled at her, on solid ground for once. “I’ll show you. It’s a good skill to have.”

“Maybe I can learn to set up my own tent, so someone else doesn’t have to when we make camp,” Dagna said brightly. “It’s such a nice tent, too. I didn’t expect everything in it to be sized right for me, with the whole Inquisition run by humans and elves and qunari.”

“The standard stuff is enormous,” Harding said wryly. “I had a terrible time at first, so I made sure you had things of the right size for girls like us.”

“Oh!” Dagna said. “Thank you! I appreciated not having to saw the legs off of everything like I did in my quarters in Skyhold.”

Harding had a sudden vision of Dagna wrestling furniture twice her size with a saw in one hand in the middle of the night, and couldn’t hold back a giggle.

Dagna bounced and clapped her hands. “There! I knew I could make you laugh sometime!” She sighed dramatically. “Everyone is so serious all the time. I know the world is ending, but can’t we make the best of things?”

Dagna’s grin was too infectious for Harding to resist grinning back. “I guess so.”

“Anyway,” Dagna added, “We want Cvetka to grow up happy, so we have to teach her how.”

“If anyone can teach that, Arcanist, it’s you,” Harding said fervently.

“You know,” Dagna said with a twinkle in her eye, “If we’re going to be parenting together, I’ll feel silly with you calling me a title all the time. I mean, I already feel silly with everyone calling me a title all the time. I’m just Dagna. Please just call me Dagna?”

Harding swallowed. “My name is, well... Lace. My mother was a seamstress,” she added hastily. “Please don’t call me Lace in front of people. No one will take me seriously. You can call me Harding.”

Dagna grinned. “Okay, Harding.” She paused, looking thoughtful. “You and Cvetka are kind of a matched set. Lace and Blossom.”

Harding cocked her head to one side. “What does your name mean, then?”

“Oh, mine isn’t pretty like that. It’s just something about judgment by the Stone. Very traditional, like my parents.” A shadow crossed Dagna’s face for a moment, then she went back to her usual bubbly self. Harding filed that reaction away in the back of her mind to examine more closely later.

Harding unrolled the bundle of her tent and spread it out on the empty patch of ground next to Dagna’s, nodding when it did indeed fit easily into the space. It wasn’t enough room for a full size tent, but it was just enough for her little one.

“The scout tents are a clever design, since a lot of the time we’re going places where there aren’t trees of the right kind to use to make new poles every night like than can in some places. They have segmented poles that snap together. They came from one of Varric’s contacts.”

Dagna picked up an edge of the tent and peered at it. “They are clever. I hadn’t thought about how tents would be made, since you don’t need them underground, and we don’t have trees anyway. What kind of tree are tents usually made with?”

“Willow, because they’re flexible. There are willows in the Hinterlands of Ferelden, where I grew up, but once we started scouting into the Storm Coast and the deserts in Orlais, it was obvious we’d need something else - and I guess the Inquisitor took Varric with her, and he talked to someone, because the tents showed up. Mine is custom, but it’s by the same person, whoever they are. All the communication with them goes through Varric. Merchant’s Guild, I guess.”

Dagna grinned. “It must be a dwarf, then. I wonder if I can convince Varric to let me talk to them? These really are clever fastenings. Nobody of the Smiths back in Orzammar worked like this.”

“I’m sure he’d listen to you,” Harding said. “Everyone wants to work with you, except people like Harritt.”

“He’s not so bad, really, he just likes grumbling. I don’t think he really minds me. Not like some of the mages in the Circles. I was thrown out of half the Circles in Thedas before the war started.”

“Why?” Harding asked, surprised.

“They don’t like new ideas,” Dagna said ruefully. “And all I am is new ideas. I can’t help it.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” Harding said without thinking about it. “I mean, your ideas have all been really useful,” she added hastily. “The Inquisitor’s always showing off her newest armor and things from you and bragging about how good they are.”

“Does she really?” Dagna asked, delighted. “I make sure her things are tinted with the prettiest ores for her coloring, too. There’s no reason armor shouldn’t look nice.”

Harding cast her mind back, and realized that the Inquisitor’s armor _had_ all been in shades of purple in the last few months, and it had set off the purple tones in her grey skin beautifully. “You’re right, it does look nice on her.”

Dagna narrowed her eyes at Harding. “I should make something for you. You’re the Inquisition’s chief scout, you’re in more danger than the Inquisitor half the time. And I’ve got some lovely leathers in green that would set off your eyes a treat.” Before Harding had time to object that she was in no way important enough for the kind of incredibly effective and deeply magical armors that the Inquisitor and her party wore, Dagna had dropped the topic entirely and turned back to the tent. “So how do you get it from a pile on the ground to a home away from home?”

“The taller sorts can do it from the outside, but my arms aren’t long enough,” Harding confessed. “So I duck inside it to start snapping the poles together. Once a whole one is together, it stays up enough that it isn’t on top of my head for the other two.”

“I wonder if there’s a more efficient way to-” Dagna started, then shook her head. “Nevermind, this isn’t the time for it, and you don’t want me putting runes on your tent. I’ll requisition a spare back at Skyhold to tinker with. I might be able to make them assemble themselves, if I add lyrium just right.” She ducked through the door flap of the tent and felt for a pole, then snapped two sections of it together. “Like this?”

“Yes,” Harding said, hurriedly ducking inside as well. She couldn’t just let the Arcanist set up her tent for her. Her back pressed against Dagna’s in the small space, and she could feel the vital warmth of the other dwarf through her armor. She blushed and focused on snapping together the poles, trying to think about nothing but tents. Canvas and metal and definitely not defined biceps straining against wool.

Harding turned, snapping together the last sections to the middle of the pole she was working on, and her hands met Dagna’s at the peak of the tent. Dagna grinned down at her, hair mussed and brushed into her eyes from the tent running against it, and dropped down off her tiptoes from reaching up to the peak. “These don’t fall down at all, do they? Because we had that nasty storm last week, and my tent didn’t even wobble, so the connections in the poles must be really sturdy. They look like it, but it’s hard to tell some things just by looking.”

Harding blinked and shoved her mind back onto the topic of tent poles. “They’re very strong. One scouting group ended up under a mudslide, once, and their tents held up enough to leave them space to breathe until their sentries could dig them out.”

“That’s brilliant!” Dagna said. “I wouldn’t have thought of there being hazards like that on the surface, since the sky can’t cave in. What causes a mudslide?”

“Lots of rain, generally. If the ground gets too wet it can’t hold together, and sometimes the whole tops of hills will slide off. That scouting team really shouldn’t have been camping where they were in that weather.”

“I’m glad I have you to pick places for us to camp, then!” Dagna said. “I know how to avoid places where the ceiling might cave in, but I still don’t quite understand weather and hills and things.”

Harding hesitated, but she’d been wondering something since the first time she met a dwarf from Orzammar. “What did you think, when you first saw the sky? Father said some dwarves are afraid they’ll fall into it.”

“Well, I wasn’t afraid of that. The Warden told me no one had ever fallen into the sky, and anyway, it’s not like we fall into the ceiling down in Orzammar, so I didn’t see any reason why the ground wouldn’t hold things down just the same without a ceiling. I didn’t know what to think the first time it rained, though. I yelled something about it flooding, and the First Enchanter had to explain that it didn’t always flood when it rained.” Dagna smiled reminiscently, her eyes distant. “It was much stranger the first time I saw a bird. I thought the Warden might have been lying, except it wasn’t falling up, it was going across. So I asked Avexis and she explained about things flying. She made a paper airplane to show me, too, and I spent a week working out how to make a rune-powered bird. The Tranquil in the kitchen let me look at the chickens before and after they plucked them so I could see how wings were put together. It’s terribly interesting how many different kinds of _animals_ there are up here! Instead of just nugs and deepstalkers and brontos.” She stopped suddenly and blushed. “Sorry, I always let my tongue run away with me.”

“It’s all right,” Harding assured her hurriedly. “I asked! I’ve never been able to ask anyone that before, because all the dwarves I’ve met were either lifelong surfacers or they didn’t want to talk to a filthy casteless surfacer.” Harding forced a smile. “We’d better finish getting this tent up so we can relieve Nerissa from baby duty. She’ll probably want to eat again. Setka, I mean.”

“Oh, right, the tent. Oops.” Dagna grinned. “Let’s get it up, then!”

 


End file.
